‘Angels in America’ Is Returning to Broadway With Nathan Lane

“Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s sweeping masterwork, will be revived at the Neil Simon Theater next spring, a quarter century after its winged title character first hovered over a Broadway stage.

The revival will star Nathan Lane, the acclaimed stage actor (“The Producers”), as the anti-Communist lawyer Roy Cohn, as well as Andrew Garfield (“Hacksaw Ridge,” “The Amazing Spider-Man”) as Prior Walter, a gay man with AIDS, and Denise Gough (“People, Places and Things”) as Harper Pitt, a Mormon woman with a fondness for Valium.

But the real star is the two-play drama itself, a staggeringly ambitious look at identity, illness and Americanness, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and the Reagan administration. The plays, with the subtitle “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” are among the most important American theater works of the 20th Century; the first play, “Millennium Approaches,” won a Pulitzer Prize, and both (the second is called “Perestroika”) won Tony Awards for best new play.

The revival, directed by Marianne Elliott (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”), was created by the National Theater in London, and was staged there earlier this year. It is scheduled to begin previews on Broadway Feb. 23 and to open March 21; the New York run, produced by Tim Levy of NT America and Jordan Roth of Jujamcyn Theaters, is scheduled to last 18 weeks.

Ms. Elliott said that many of those who came to see the plays in London had never seen them before, and that she was heartened by how pertinent the themes remained, even if the setting, in the 1980s, is no longer fully contemporary.

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James McArdle, left, and Andrew Garfield in “Angels in America” at the National Theater.CreditHelen Maybanks

“It feels like it’s really hitting the pulse of what we’re all dealing with now,” she said. “What’s going on across the world, in America, in Europe, is all making a lot of us quite unsettled and worried, and this play talks about how to be generous, how to be inclusive, how we are all interconnected, and when you come out of your despair you migrate emotionally and mentally and sometimes physically as well.”

The producers have a long history with “Angels” — both plays ran at the National Theater before arriving on Broadway in the 1990s, and the original Broadway productions were produced by Jujamcyn.

“Angels in America is such a seminal piece for our country, for the theater, and for so many of us individually and collectively,” Mr. Roth said. “It is speaking to a whole new time and a whole new moment in our country in ways that are so powerful and essential — I don’t think we knew back then how much this piece itself was a prophecy.”

This year’s London production was notable for its scale — the stage was not only wide, but also unusually deep — and that cannot be replicated on Broadway. But Ms. Elliott and the producers said they would find ways to create a similar visual experience.

“Absolutely, the size and the scale of this physical production is epic, and we are pulling out all the stops to make it epic,” Mr. Levy said.

Seven of the eight principal performers in the British cast are coming to New York with the production; the eighth, Russell Tovey (“Quantico”), was unable to make the move because of a television role; the production now needs to cast someone as Joe Pitt, the closeted gay Mormon law clerk Mr. Tovey played in London.

Angels in America | Nathan Lane on Roy CohnCreditVideo by National Theatre